Star Wars actor Jake Lloyd doing 'much better' after psychotic break

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Jake Lloyd is receiving treatment after a psychotic break.

The Star Wars actor — who played the young Anakin Skywalker in 1999 blockbuster Episode One — The Phantom Menace — was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2008, and his mother Lisa has opened up about his mental health 25 years after the movie hit the big screen.

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She told Scripps News how her son, now 35, suffered a psychotic break in March 2023 while she was driving him home from McDonald’s.

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She recalled: “He said he wanted to turn the car off. And he turned the car off in the middle of the three lanes, and we were in the middle lane.

“There was a lot of yelling and screaming.”

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She said while talking to police, “none of it made sense,” but instead of jail, he was admitted to hospital before being transferred to a mental health rehabilitation facility a couple of months later.

He is around 10 months into an 18-month in-patient stay, and Lisa admitted her son is “doing much better” then she expected.

She added: “He is relating to people better and becoming a little bit more social, which is really nice.

“It’s kind of like having more of the old Jake back, because he has always been incredibly social until he became schizophrenic.”

She explained how his mental health struggles started in high school as Jake “started talking about realities,” and he was having what she later realized were hallucinations.

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She said: “He didn’t tell us he was hearing voices at the time. But he was.”

He was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2008, while he also suffers with anosognosia, which is a condition causing a patient to be unaware of, or unconsciously denying, their symptoms.

In 2015, he was arrested after leading police on a chase before crashing his car.

He spent 10 months in jail, before she was able to transfer him into a hospital for treatment.

Despite her son quitting Hollywood at a young age, Lisa has rubbished the idea that he has any ill will towards ‘Star Wars’.

She insisted he “loves all the new ‘Star Wars’ stuff”, and she doesn’t think the backlash over ‘The Phantom Menace’ from critics and fans at the time had anything to do with his mental health struggle.

Noting that there is a history of schizophrenia on his dad’s side of the family, she said: “It would have happened anyway. I believe that it was genetic. And his psychiatrist also agrees that Jake was going to become schizophrenic.”

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